ABOUT

Not only the physical world exists today. There is an equivalent one that we only perceive with our eyes. Yet this on-screen world is real. Everything is possible there; unicorns and mermaids exist and become part of our lives. But the world in the digital realm is very fragile. At some point in the future, it may no longer be accessible; its devices and hardware will become purely objects. The online exhibition Mermaids & Unicorns examines how today’s artists working in varied media explore the phenomenon of evanescence. They reflect on the pictorial history of vanitas and evanescence, the concept of absence in the visual present or the topic of “digital obsolescence” in today’s post-digital living conditions.

The term “evanescence” evokes the concept of the memento mori, a reminder of death as a part of life applicable to every human unable to be changed or controlled. However, memento mori suggests a life constantly remembering this fact. Throughout all époques, artists visualized this topic in medieval danse macabre images or baroque vanitas still lives alternating between beauty and decay. Motifs like skeletons, skulls, hour glasses, masks, coins, scores, candles, fruits, flowers, flies, spiders or other insects served to symbolize evanescence. The composition and contextualization of the elements created their meaning.

In the 20th century, cubist still lives dissolved and deconstructed objects. Abstraction showed evanescence as something fleeting, too. Painting stopped serving as a means of preserving (the beauty of) reality. From then until now, evanescence expressing the ephemerality and fragility of things adopted new visual codes. Many artists today work with materials which embody temporality and fragility, such as ice, wax, wood or other natural materials and build fragile short-lived, time-based sculptures which tend to dissolve or installations underlining the transient state of things and life.

Vanitas imagery is about visually depicting something that is not actually there. Further, the depicted objects from the real world are not tangible, as they too are just a depicted representation. This also applies to the essence of the digital, the internet and everything we perceive on our screens. In the Digital Age, evanescence is attributed a brand new meaning, as ephemerality lies in the medium itself. The visual beats the material.

Thinking about the future, digital obsolescence becomes very relevant in terms of evanescence, too. The rapid evolution of computer hardware, software and operating systems lacks sustainability and therefore generates data loss very quickly. Data has no physical form, but storage media do. Think about archeological excavations in the distant future, the hardware — from floppy discs to IPhones — will become purely objects, as stored data will be inaccessible. So, the current digital era can be considered a period of transience. Facing this fact now and being unable to change it, we fear our own ephemerality and death, which results in focusing on our “life is now”. We generate an enormous data flood on our Facebook timelines, Tweets, feeds, Snapchat, and photo roll. We suffer from FOMO, depression, burn-out, emotional or anxiety disorders.

Basically, these images are black and white. At least they were once, sometime in the 50s or 60s, when the original photographs were exposed. The negatives, which originate from estate sales were scanned and recorded at the moment of their first the manifestation: the camera was pointed at the computer screen and set off at the exact moment when the scanned image was converted into a positive. That those second exposures do not only show pixels, but also colors, is due to the interference of light waves, which show up as a rainbow color pattern on the gray levels of the once analog photography. In the reseen version of Ornella Fieres she finds a link to photographers of that time and herself through the interference that causes this overlay: an overlay of gray and colored, of past and today, analog and digital.

As an artist I work with the idea and suggestion of clouds and rainbows, and their possible meaning within an irregular setting. I am interested in the cultural reverences around these images and phenomenon’s. They contain romantic ideas, the sublime, and represent both the ideal and perishable.

In his collages from cassette tapes (a very outdated information medium these days) artist Gregor Hildebrandt mirrors earthly goods like this flower boquet, a traditional symbol for evanescence. The viewer perceives its distorted reflection that here is visually but not physically present.

Built-in Views investigates the mix of digital and analog textures, colors and shapes, to be integrated in a self-reflective 3D environment. This surreal landscape evolves in an unsettling ecosystem, where the reflective plastic surfaces and the electronic textures suggests the dichotomy of materiality and light, the analog and the digital, and the unavoidable fusion of the two.

INDEX depicts a project space from Vancouver BC, Canada, which operated between 2012 & 2015. Drawn from memory, the animation portrays the project space being setup for an electronic music event named "Rain Dance", which I coproduced with local music producers LNS and Scott W. in August 2015. The work is titled "INDEX" in reference to the actual name of the project space.

Katie Torn integrates 3D computer graphics and video to model virtually simulated scenes out of the detritus of internet and consumer culture. Collecting discarded products and elements available online, Torn’s digital assemblages carry traces of past consumer eras and web browsing histories. Referencing 20th century investigations into pictorial space and representations of the body found in the Modernist traditions of Cubism and Futurism, Torn abstracts and mechanizes female forms to create fantasy worlds that could only exist in a digital realm.

This work is meant to induce a trance state. I think of it as a gif version of a sixties blacklight painting on velvet. The imagery inspired by a 1963 photo by the British artist Jean Straker, known in the fifties for his erotic images of unconventional female beauties. His work was regularly confiscated by the British authorities, resulting in Straker becoming known as an activist who helped to change to the censorship laws of his time. I reconstructed Straker's photo and then used a variety of digital processes to lay- different types of pulsating visual patterns over it, from strobing light simulations to the simulation of the motion of a curtain slowly fluttering in the breeze - I hope, a kind of space of disembodiment, a liminal zone between life and death.

The Face-Swap Archive is an exploration of the monstrous in algorithmic sight. The approximately 100 video clips explore the weird side of selfie culture and descend into the depths of the uncanny valley. While most selfie apps appeal to our vanity, offering us more attractive, likeable, perfect versions of ourselves, face-swap technology offers the opposite: a horrifying glimpse of ourselves distorted through an algorithmic lens. The expansive collection illuminates the parameters according to which an algorithm defines, or 'recognises' a face - often resulting in bizarre errors like a dress hanging on a coat hanger that somehow becomes a mask to be worn.

Terminal by Karolina Halatek is a large scale immersive light sculpture shown in Gerlingen on the Rathausplatz on the occasion of the light art festival "Aufstiege" by KulturRegion Stuttgart. The artwork was inspired by the near-death experiences of people, who, returned from unconsciousness, reported their experiences at the threshold of death.

For this project I used images I shot but could not print because when I saw them, they reminded me of the time that is gone. The images haunted me. When I read about memory in Marcel Proust's books, I found the solution: to use those images as the material to create another image.1) I scanned the negatives and printed them.2) I shot the pictures with a polaroid camera.3) I scanned the pictures I shot with a polaroid camera and then I printed them again.4) I shot them with the polaroid camera again. I repeated this method over and over.This project follows the question if a personal image may loose its own time and be-come the image of another time. For my method, I decided to use a polaroid camera because they create an "instant picture".

Imagine a culture that doesn't know now. this culture is not on Now. a reason for a culture not to use now, is for it to simply have no sense of now, or maybe it lives at another Now: Then or When… it might be a culture without a #LinearTime: there is no in-between. Or maybe, this culture simply does not use this sense of an horizon.

Paintings that questions "the distance and the meeting point between movements, thoughts, cultural constructions that repel and attract each other, forming an energy: time; the time that has educated us, the time told by the winners in all areas of our past and our present, popular culture, television, music, the speed of the click on the internet, the uncontrollable world of ideas, good or bad ideas; of the various moments where several creators tried to capture the visibility of their truth, their ego, their present [...] frames of a chronological line that does not stop and continues killing their geniuses by the way, transforming them into clichés."

A 50 second video striving for the pithiness of .gifs and awkwardly tackling futurism, nihilism and the obsolescence of our reality, futures and ideals, through contemporary sci-fi quotes delivered in text-to-speech by the pretty-perfect humans of RuPaul's Drag Race.

voc #1 is the first motion painting of a new series by Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel. The Animated GIF shows a delicate structure in continuous flux, with its title referring to the so called "volatile organic compounds" which are organic chemicals, that have a high vapor pressure. In his work Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science. By the organic interplay of various structural, spatial and temporal concepts, he creates a continuously evolving complexity.

Paula Doepfner’s work combines powerful and fragile materials, scientific rigour and poetic openness. She explores the inconsistency and complexity of inner conditions and addresses the difficulty to understand subjective experiences. Broken glass or melting ice enclose organic matters such as dried plants, or drawings with tiny hand-written exerpts taken from poetic or neuroscientific texts. The works are dealing with the incompability of emotion and thought, while at the same time creating an aware-ness of the impossibility of complete comprehension of internal processes.

For the installation 1:1 two airguns were mounted on a steel bar – directly facing one another. Within a rhythm of 15 minutes they simultaneously shoot their bullets at each other. These bullets are filled with black pigments and as soon as their exact juxtaposition allows a collision, both projectiles clash and explode, releasing the black pigments.The strictly staged experimental set-up of the installation contradicts the lack of control that allows a formation of the actual sculpture. A gun – especially when precisely pointed at a target – provides its operator with power and control. Here, these forces are doubled and mirrored at each other.

The exhibition is over. Some works were rows and other piers. The space has been cleared. Surfaces were digitized to keep track of. These 3D models can be reused to print these traces and reproduce the same exhibition. A software navigates infinitely on these 3D scans. Grafted onto this forms a material that reacts to movements. It invaded the area and transforms it.

Mark Dorf is a New York based artist whose creative practice employs a mixture of photography, digital media, and sculpture. In his most recent work, Dorf explores society's perceptions of and interactions with the digital domain, urban and architectural environments, and the "Natural Landscape". With an interest in technology and science, he scrutinizes and examines the influence of the information age in order to understand our curious habitation of the 21st century world.

I drew the original version of "after Fuseli" (New Nightmares) in June of 2015. It was inspired by the The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli. It was also a response to the new nightmares of racism and xenophobia spreading throughout the United States; or perhaps, these events were just being more exposed, due to citizens increased use of recording hate crimes and victimization on their phones. Although my avatar is dressed in a Wonder Woman suit, there seem to be no superpowers capable of stopping this vicious cycle.

In her series Still Life With Meat artist Katharina Arndt draws sausages and meat with lurid markers and acrylic paint on black and shiny lacquer fabric. The composed arrangement evokes still=lifes of the Old Masters, but it refers to contemporary product images found on the internet. They symbolize the insatiable hunger and the decadence of the Western affluent society.

Miriam Vlaming has already dealt with the symbiosis of man and nature since her early periods of production. The artist combines her protagonists with their surrounding floral ornamentation. Vlaming’s recent series Eden (2016) draws attention to this exact leitmotif, since she not only discusses the symbiosis of man and nature, but also the foreign in oneself and others. Maria in the Forest displays a graceful female figure, which arises from wild natural ornamentation. Likewise elegantly and lofty, Maria steps out of wild structures of landscape, as if nature gave birth to man. Vlaming explores the boundlessness and discrepancies between evolution and religious belief since she interlaces Maria - as the representative of spirituality - with wild nature.

This piece is a self-documentation; a series of self portraits. It is an autobiography of still images flickering by. It shows how quickly time passes through webcam photographs using the program photobooth. The self continues to metamorphize, shedding past lives and concepts.

Alexandra Baumgartner uses found photographs from magazines to recontextualize them. The artist is not interested in the actual content but in the emotional state transported within the images. In her works she deals with the fragile correlations between social and societal constraints, human nature and relationships.

Martychowiec’s installations are characterised by intellectual and symbolic qualities and show his interest and involvement in history and anthropology of art. He uses their tradition to construct individual artistic language and narratives. His practice sources ideas from philosophy (both oriental and occidental), history, history of art, history of religion, literature, contemporary culture and communication.

Rose Eken sculpts objects found in concert halls, in kitchens, in artists’ studios and similarly ubiquitous locations. Cigarette butts, empty soda cans, utensils and dishrags, pens and power tools mars bars and tic tacks. She methodically replicates our everyday consumer detritus often placing them very systematic in a grid, suggestive of scientific categorization. Her arrangements and sheer amount of production assume an anthropological quality, documenting and preserving the relics of a culture and celebrating a history in process.

In general, my work deconstructs the photograph and cinema still as historical documents while indicting the viewer's complicity in the brutal control structures which bind us. In this piece, the nostalgic veneer of tinted 19th century photography is faked through computer graphics in the depiction of a hybrid Heidelberg press death bed.

Katherine Frazer is a digital artist whose work depicts how consumer technologies alter and encode memory. In her collaborations with her computer's algorithmic graphic editing tools, she manipulates photos and metadata, creating immaterial, archival collages. The triptych katamari 1a-3a depicts pieces of textured forms drifting together and amassing in space. iPhone photos of everyday objects are taken to construct physically impossible 3D models. These models serve as scrap material where pieces are extracted, collected, and reassembled to comprise create forms situated between the analog and digital.

I integrate multiple decorative found objects into larger, open, lay-ed configurations, and place the resulting forms within a theatrical context that prompts a self-guided process of meaning-making in the viewer. The somewhat uncanny sensation of these reconfigured, less representational forms is intended to generate a sense of suspicion or disbelief of the representational power of the original forms. The resulting work accesses a form of visual communication akin to pseudo-science, mysticism, mythology, and other phenomena.

Charlie Stein deals with the existing diverse perceptions of cultural identities within the context of an assumed global society. Her material is often gathered through the act of conversation and is translated into drawings, installations, objects, paintings and text.

Dead Drops was created by Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl while he was artist-in-residence at Eyebeam, NY, in 2010. It is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public spaceUSB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Dead Drops was part of the “Talk to Me” show at New York's MoMA, July-Nov 2011.

Who will take care of our digital memories? going through a box full of old family photos i realized how strong it was the need and the wish to make a moment last for ever, a photo printed on paper is always accessible to the human eye. Nowadays we rely all of our memories on digital matter. The digital is so vulnerable to software updates, file corruptions, conversion errors, viruses infections. We have an abundance of memories and abundance makes them less valuable. In the digital era an instant is meant to last an instant? So, who will take care of our digital memories if we don't?"

Alfredo Salazar-CaroScan of Diego Rivera's Tomb surrounded by Death Rite stones being summoned through a Sri Yantra for healing and balance of male and female spirits, 2016, animated GIF, 3D scans

Can an altar be digitized? Can a ritual take place on a webpage? I grew up surrounded by witchcraft and magic, always rejecting it, always shying away from it. Now the internet is my medium and tumblr is where I build my altars. These gifs are combinations of magical/Ritualistic objects 3D scanned from IRL (Coatlicue figure, Ritual death figure, Tomb of Diego Rivera) and then applied to virtual shrines. May these gifs be fruitful, may your wireless connection stay strong.

Abundant arrangements of flowers, shiny plastic wraps, snippets of images from glossy magazines and remains of information from billboards - there are some of the sensual, sometimes sinister and morbid components, found in the paintings of Grigori Dor. He arranges them in collage formations as vibrant collisions of found materials. By transforming images and lifting them out of existing contexts, by rearranging, taking of photos and finally the transfer to the canvas through the process of painting, he creates new contexts as well as new realities and investigates the collective visual memory.

Clickbait 3 is a direct Inspiration of Vanitas painter Clara Peeter's self portrait. This piece is also a continuation in a series that explores the futility of social medias and internet spam.Model's name: Vanessa Neutral.

As a way to deal with this primal fear, Aviv Benn ironically laughs at death with her paintings and reintegrates it into society and personal life. The artist dissects the perfect entity of the body into separate parts that do not decay, but in fact come to life individually in the artist’s vivid works. Her absurd combinations of gestures and expressions are inspired by cartoons, punk aesthetics, depictions of vanitas or danse macabre, the Middle Ages and Northern Renaissance as well as Internet imagery.

"Everything that I wish I could be is an exploration of language, emotions and the desire to change and improve one’s self. There is a self-help book for almost every moment and problem in life; from relationship advice to dealing with the inevitability of death. Each large format photograph, pictures an arrangement of title pages and spines, from up to 100 self-help books that are based around a central theme. Together, the titles create larger narratives, which become portraits of emotions, people and events in life."

phénomène femme uses the ephemeral nature of Craigslist ads to express the longing to create a relationship (even a professional one) on the internet and the mistrust that comes from the unknown person behind the posting.

Ann Schomburg’s Remember uses associative images collaged into a fever dream structured video. The subject of personal memories recreating a past based on their own subjective memories questions the validity of a general so called history. The sound of the videos has quotes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway "I like to remember things my own way, not necessary the way they happened".

I spend a lot of time thinking about how nature prevails against all odds. When I first moved to New York I was really taken aback by these trees in Bedstuy near my studio that had grown through a wrought iron fence. The tree just kept growing around this man-made object as if it wasn’t there. That image has stuck with me. The sprout covered clothing transforms itself out of fashion and into a symbol for the human body and our possessions. Clothing is meant to keep us protected from the elements but nature is unforgiving in many ways. We consume a lot these days, and our consumption is consuming us because it is harming the planet. It feels as though it's only a matter of time before nature gets even.